DECEMBER 29, 2020|NON-OBVIOUS THINKING
An Unusual Way to Find New Trends: Watch for Corporate Patents
While reading about trends, I discovered The Patent Drop newsletter from Neer Sharma, which delivers a weekly look at corporate patents. One issue featured details about Facebook's efforts to patent an “animatronic eye” that tracks user eye movements, and Spotify's latest patent filed for technology that can understand the mood of a video and suggest appropriate music.
I love ideas like this which help you see around the corner and discover things that no one else is paying attention to. My own method for doing this involves looking at announced books that will be published 6 to 12 months in the future. Both techniques look at publicly available data and offer a way to leverage it to develop trend insights.
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How It All Started
A Short Backstory Of This Blog
This is a blog about non-obvious ideas. Originally launched on the Typepad platform in 2005 as the Influential Marketing blog, the stories at first focused mainly on digital marketing while Rohit worked at Ogilvy Advertising. In 2015 Rohit officially rebranded to the Non-Obvious Insights Blog and published his WSJ bestseller Non-Obvious. For the past twenty one years, this blog has coined new terms, introduced future marketing practices and inspired the next generation of non-obvious thinkers and marketers.
